Did Biden, Pelosi, and Schumer Already Blow Up the Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal?

W hat did Republicans have to gain by going along with Democrats on a bipartisan infrastructure deal?

Before Thursday, the logic of the Senate Republicans pushing for a deal seemed pretty straightforward: Giving Joe Manchin and other moderate Democrats what they want in a pared-down, bipartisan deal would decrease the pressure on those Democrats to support a multi-trillion-dollar reconciliation bill passed on a strict party-line vote with Vice President Harris as the tiebreaker. And as an added bonus, it might also help preserve the filibuster.

On Thursday, the group of five Senate Republicans and five Senate Democrats joined President Biden at the White House to announce that they had reached a deal to spend $579 billion on infrastructure over the next five years.

But around the same time as the deal was announced, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi made clear that a bipartisan Senate bill would not even receive a vote in the House until all 50 Senate Democrats and Harris had first passed a big reconciliation bill. Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer backed Pelosi’s plan, and Biden soon followed suit: At a second press conference on Thursday afternoon, the president said that if the bipartisan deal “is the only thing that comes to me, I’m not signing it.”

The Biden-Pelosi-Schumer strategy has already received some blowback from members of Congress. Two negotiators of the Senate deal, Republican Susan Collins of Maine and Democrat Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, rejected the idea of conditioning a bipartisan deal on the passage of a Democrats-only reconciliation bill.

Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, one of the ten Senate Republicans who expressed support for the bipartisan deal, flatly said that he’d vote against it if it followed the passage of a partisan reconciliation bill. “If reports are accurate that President Biden is refusing to sign a bipartisan deal unless reconciliation is also passed, that would be the ultimate deal breaker for me,” Graham wrote on Twitter. “I don’t mind working with the other side for the common good, but I’m not going to be extorted by liberal Democrats or anyone else.”

A few hours later, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell went on Fox News to say that Democratic leadership’s insistence on passing a big, partisan reconciliation bill first had made him “pessimistic” that the bipartisan deal would make it through the upper chamber.

But while the bipartisan deal is in real trouble, it’s still far too early to say whether it will die.

It only takes one Democratic senator to torpedo a reconciliation bill, which gives enormous leverage to Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. They could, if they wanted, insist on nixing the sorts of big tax hikes that they oppose, or set a limit on how much extra spending they’d be willing to swallow.

Meanwhile, North Carolina Republican Thom Tillis, one of the ten Senate Republicans supportive of the bipartisan deal, says that his support for the bipartisan deal doesn’t depend in any way on what Democrats do in a reconciliation bill.

“I think it’s great,” Tillis said of the deal in the Capitol on Thursday afternoon. “I’m excited about the progress we’ve made.”

Tillis told National Review that Democrats would pass a reconciliation bill “no matter what” Republicans do, and he still thinks “passing this (bipartisan) infrastructure bill has the effect of reducing the aspirations of the targets that Democrats will do on their own.”

But Tillis added that if Democrats pass a multi-trillion-dollar reconciliation bill that raises taxes, they will do so “at their own peril.”

“You come in at a time when we’re already seeing transitory inflation becoming a long-term threat . . . so buying power is reduced, and then you raise taxes, which could have a chilling effect,” Tillis warned.

Asked if voting for a $579 billion infrastructure package would muddy Republicans’ message on spending and inflation in 2022, Tillis said: “The American people tend to like infrastructure. . . . When you go back home and you talk about how this infrastructure bill is going to help repair more than 300 borderline-unsafe bridges in North Carolina and accelerate expansion of highways, I think people in North Carolina get it.”

Tillis said that the Republican message in 2022 would focus on Democratic tax hikes. “They’re going to have to sell to the American people why they’re going to raise taxes,” he said of Democrats. “That’s the message.”

Correction: This article originally reported that Senator Tillis is up for re-election in 2022; he is not up for re-election until 2026. The North Carolina Senate seat up in 2022 is held by retiring GOP senator Richard Burr.